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Cencorship coming to the UK

You may of heard over the last week or so that the goverment is planning on making ISP's adhere to a new law which means that all households with an internet connection in the UK will have a filter installed to block adult material unless they specifically opt in to it. The filter is aimed to remove child pornography and other illegal adult material from the web, and nobody is going to disagree that these images and videos should be removed but there is a wider issue here. A simple word from the goverment and we are being censored what is being censored is irrelavent here, the facility to block whatever they dont like is being put in place. Is this any different from political powers around the world who are also trying to censor the internet. what is our view of these people? we think they are dictators and they use appresive behaviour.

It is important to know that pornography itself is not illegal, so these filters will remove 99% legal material to catch the 1% that they are trying to remove. would it not be better to focus on stopping the sites that promote illegal material and catching the people that make the ilegal material?

The question here I'm thinking is what is next? will 18 rated movies be banned through the internet unless you specifically tell your ISp that you want them? or can it not be enough that you are old enough to make your own choices in life. Also these filters can be worked around, after all this is the internet, the people who use it for illegal activity are those that know how to manipulate it. The average user that a filter will stop will not be the person that is looking for illegal images and videos online. Stop it by all means its a horrible thing to think that children are being abused in this way, but what you are trying will not help and you are opening the floodgates to removing many more genres of fully legal content just because you cant stop that small section of its illegal use.

Reading in today's news that the co-op are forcing some "lads" magazines to cover up there front pages by placing them in modesty packaging or they will be removed from sale, while others are calling for legal action to be taken against them. This is the same thing, how can you threaten legal action against something that is not illegal. The images are not pornographic, sexy images yes, but not porn. Shops display them normally in lads sections normally high up. If kids see them its because they have been left to browse in the wrong section un-supervised. Why is it always someone's fault. If you don't want your kid to see those images, don't them go to that section of the magazines. we dont want do anything illegal we just want to choose which legal things we are allowed to do. *Angry*